Non-fiction

Electricity was the scientific fashion of the Enlightenment, 'an Entertainment for Angels, rather than for Men'. Lecturers attracted huge audiences...

Rosa Bonheur was the very antithesis of the feminine ideal of 19th-century society. She was educated, she shunned traditional 'womanly' pursuits, s...

Are we alone in the Universe, or are there as many planets supporting life as there are stars in the sky? It's one of the most important and fascin...

The controversial science that claims to have revolutionised economics. For centuries, economics was dominated by the idea that we are rational ind...

illustrated by Piero Capitalism shapes every aspect of our world, beyond just our economic structures; it moulds our values and influences the way ...

In the late 1940s, a handful of visionaries were working to steer Europe towards a more peaceful future through science, and CERN, the European par...

All the matter and light we can see in the universe makes up a trivial 5 percent of everything. The rest is hidden. This could be the biggest puzzl...

Progress in genetics today would not be possible without Darwin's revolution, but the mysterious man who laid the rational basis for undermining be...

When the Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon in 1969, many people imagined Mars would be next. However NASA's Viking 1, which landed in 1976, was ...

When Economyths was first published in 2010, David Orrell showed how mainstream economics is based on key myths such as fair competition, rational ...

In 1859, Charles Darwin shocked the world with a radical theory - evolution by natural selection. One hundred and fifty years later, his theory sti...

illustrated by Judy Groves What is feminism? Why are we still talking about it, and what can it tell us about ourselves, our societies and prejudic...

This is not a book about how to be posh. We have some slightly bigger issues to deal with these days. We've all got a million things to do and are ...

illustrated by Jules Scheele Is masculinity ‘toxic’? Why are public toilets such a political issue? How has feminism changed the available gender r...

Genetics is the newest of all sciences - nothing useful was known about inheritance until just over a century ago. Now genetics is exploding, and b...

On 14 September 2015, after 50 years of searching, gravitational waves were detected for the first time and astronomy changed for ever. Until then,...

Feeling stuck in his life, New York Times food writer Jeff Gordinier met Rene Redzepi, the Danish chef whose restaurant, Noma, has been repeatedly ...

Francis Bacon - a leading figure in the history of science - never made a major discovery, provided a lasting explanation of any physical phenomena...

When Pete Etchells was 14, his father died from motor neurone disease. In order to cope, he immersed himself in a virtual world - first as an escap...

illustrated by Oscar Zarate Karl Marx was one of the most influential thinkers of the late 19th century, inspiring revolutions and colossal politic...

Faraday's forte was electricity, a revolutionary force in nineteenth-century society. The electric telegraph had made mass-communication possible a...

When Nicolaus Copernicus claimed that the Earth was not stationary at the centre of the universe but circled the Sun, he brought about a total revo...

For centuries mankind has waged war against the infections that, left untreated, would have the power to wipe out communities, or even entire popul...

The stories we tell about our past matter. But those stories have been shaped by prejudice, hoaxes and misinterpretations that have whitewashed ent...

illustrated by Julia Scheele Activist-academic Meg John Barker and cartoonist Julia Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ ac...

In Science for Life acclaimed science writer Brian Clegg cuts through the vested interests and confusing contradictory statements that litter the m...

Was the pursuit of scientific truth really what drove Enlightenment science? When the imperial explorer James Cook returned from his first voyage t...

Quantum physics is strange. It tells us that a particle can be in two places at once. Indeed, that particle is also a wave, and everything in the q...

Having escaped domestic servitude in Germany by teaching herself to sing, and established a career in England, Caroline Herschel learned astronomy ...

In 2003, Russian physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov found a way to produce graphene - the thinnest substance in the world - by using st...

The history of the computer is entwined with that of the modern world and with the life of one man, the brilliant but troubled Alan Turing. How did...

Popular science master Brian Clegg's new book is an entertaining tour through the science of what makes you you. From the atomic level, through lif...